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Topic: Total loss? (Read 1633 times)

I had a hive that went queenless for a while. I introduced a new Queen, 10 days later I removed the cage and was happy to see brood. That was two weeks ago. I opened the hive today to find a total wax moth infestation. All frames covered, cocoons all over the place and moths actively crawling all over the place. It still has a small cluster but I couldn't find a queen or any brood. Is there any reclamation or should I cut it all out and commit all to the solar melter :(

I had a hive that went queenless for a while. I introduced a new Queen, 10 days later I removed the cage and was happy to see brood. That was two weeks ago. I opened the hive today to find a total wax moth infestation. All frames covered, cocoons all over the place and moths actively crawling all over the place. It still has a small cluster but I couldn't find a queen or any brood. Is there any reclamation or should I cut it all out and commit all to the solar melter :(

It sounds like although they finally had a queen going good, the population had gone down too much for them to defend themselves from the moths. I just had a similar experience with one of my hives. They were queenless for too long and the population went down. Guess the lesson I learned is, while I try to get them up and running with a new queen, very important to give them frames of capped brood from another hive to keep the population up ( I knew this, but did not want to keep distrupting my one and only other good hive) I would shake the remaining bees on the ground in front of another hive. They will be accepted into the other hive.

Come on folks, reduce the space when the population goes down. Your hives will be healthier a bit crowded than trying to defend a big hive with a few bees. Take the supers off and give them to a strong hive to clean up.

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Come on folks, reduce the space when the population goes down. Your hives will be healthier a bit crowded than trying to defend a big hive with a few bees. Take the supers off and give them to a strong hive to clean up.

He really didn't specify whether the colony was low on numbers but if so, Ross is exactly right, small numbers in too much space is a recipe for shb and waxmoth.

The problem sometimes is when they swarm out on ya and you didn't know it and hadn't the time to realize it until its too late.

Come on folks, reduce the space when the population goes down. Your hives will be healthier a bit crowded than trying to defend a big hive with a few bees. Take the supers off and give them to a strong hive to clean up.

I believe what happened to me, is I opened up the top telescoping cover to give them more ventilation, not understanding that the population was so low. It actually looked very crowded to me.